Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 7/13/2022
AMHERST – The new Community Responders for Equity, Safety and Security (CRESS) and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) departments have commenced operations in Amherst following a swearing-in ceremony on July 5 at the Bangs Community Center.
“Today is a very important day for the town. It marks a new day, a day that recommits the town to our commitment to public safety,” said Town Manager Paul Bockelman. “What we want to move toward is the idea of being able to respond and also to proactively address concerns of the community that were articulated over the past two years. It’s a day that we expand the definition of what public safety means and what public safety is going to feel like in the town of Amherst.”
Bockelman continued, “It’s also a day that we are creating a new DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Department, which really cements into the town’s structure our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion which is why it’s named that. It’s the fruition of a long journey of listening, reckoning and searching for the best path forward. Everybody had a role in it and it was hard, it was tumultuous, but we got to today which is really exciting.”
The Town Council first approved the creation of both departments six months ago, which was the first time new departments were created in roughly 70 years according to Bockelman. The council voted based on the work from the Community Safety Working Group (CSWG), a group of nine Amherst residents and officials tasked with delivering two reports to the council. The stated purpose of the CSWG was to make recommendations on alternative ways of providing public safety services to the community and to make recommendations on reforms to the current organizational and oversight structures of the Amherst Police Department.
With input from the public and CSWG, Bockelman said the town developed the realization that these two departments were crucial to fund and implement as two ways of moving forward.
CRESS Director Earl Miller was hired in March and was a one-man team until being joined by Program Assistant Kat Newman in June. They hired eight responders that have started training to respond to non-violent emergency calls and be an alternative resource for members of all ages in the community. At a community forum in June, Miller said the responders will operate in four teams of two.
“When I started this job, I think about 200 of you stopped me and told me I needed to hire Kat, so mission accomplished,” Miller said. “She is the perfect candidate for this job, she’s already making it her own.”
Emergency Dispatch Supervisor Mike Curtin has helped the implementation process since it began and has already been evaluating how the dispatch team would assign calls to certain departments. In the event of calls that have the potential of becoming violent or if the status is unclear, both departments could be dispatched as a parallel response. In that case, they will decide who the call is most appropriate for upon arriving and evaluating the reason for the call.
Erika Loper, Kevawn Lord, Brittany Haughton, Vanessa Phillips, Kenneth Meikle, Rome Cabrera, Tim Durocher and Kyalo Maingi are the responders. They have a variety of backgrounds, but most have personal ties to Amherst and are longtime Amherst or Pioneer Valley residents.
“I think if you’re looking for a theme in our department, it’s that every single person really wanted to be here,” Miller said. “There’s a couple people here who I think are pretty wildly brave. A lot of you were at the event we did at Groff Park, Kevawn [Lord] came up to me and said he was interested in working here. I tried to talk him out of it as I try to talk everyone out of it, but he was pretty insistent. He applied the next day, he interviewed two days after that, he had his second interview a week later and very quickly made a determination he wanted to be here. This is a guy who’s from this town, he loves this town, who was made here, and his family is here in the first row and he’s going to make them real proud.”
After the CRESS team was sworn in, Bockelman introduced DEI Department Director Pamela Young and Assistant Director Jennifer Moyston. Bockelman said Young has done similar work at Smith College and most recently at the University of Notre Dame. He said she had very high recommendations and relocated here to work for Amherst after starting other DEI departments in the past.
“I think that the symbolism of being sworn in with the CRESS Department and the DEI Department really speaks to the town of Amherst and what you envision for this community,” Young said. “I’m really excited to be back in Western Mass., I have worked in a number of different communities in Western Mass. This really feels like home to me, I’m a military brat and I’m delighted and thrilled to be going on this journey with you, and it is a journey.”
Young continued, “I feel really blessed to have Jen [Moyston] as a partner, I know that she brings a wealth of information and community ties as an outsider coming in, she’s going to be invaluable and I really feel like this will be a team and we will have a teamwork approach to the work, but you are also part of that team. This is a community that we’re trying to transform so while I might have great ideas, I’m going to need your support and I’m going to need you to help implement them because I can’t do it as one person.”